Family practices in the construction of creative professionals. A biographical perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationships between family configurations and creative occupations. For this purpose, a biographical perspective was taken through the reconstruction of the life histories of sixteen creative professionals in Spain. We have followed two lines of approach, namely Florida’s classification of occupations (2002), which distinguishes between a creative class and a super-creative core, and Lahire’s conception of family configuration (1995). The main results reveal the importance of practices that are carried out on a daily basis by the family network (both internally and externally): reading and writing, cultural consumption (theatre, music, exhibitions, etc.), types of leisure (travelling) and forms of authority that lead the way to self-control and domestic family order. We have shown with this study the importance of the transmission of family culture in the construction of people who have creative occupations and the relationship that exists between the family educational capital and the educational level attained by the offspring.